by Zoe Forward
“That’s not news to me about Brant. What can I do to help you?” Shay experienced a powerful urge to grab him and run, despite the ankle band.
“When you meet Dakar, tell him about me. It might be years, but remind him of Aileen’s prophecy. Tell him that I know how to end his curse. And if I don’t make it this time, then I’ll tell him next time around.” The boy held a pointer finger up to his lips and glanced down the hallway.
Dakar? As in Dakarai of her fantasy? She wondered if the kid had a weird supernatural ability to pick through her memories. He looked benign enough, tortured actually.
Brant appeared. He sneered at the boy before ordering, “Follow me, Shay.”
Shay fleetingly glanced at the boy. The child’s eyes met hers, pleaded for an instant, and then glazed over into an unemotional blank. Her gut cramped as she followed Brant. This had bad idea written all over it.
Brant led her to a corner office decorated in ostentatious mahogany furnishings—modern, luxurious, and so outright boring that it gave her the willies. Where was the clutter? Her grad school desk was a certified disaster zone lost beneath papers, and dominated by her outdated blocky computer. Here, everything lay in pristine perfection. Even the solo fountain pen rested too casually near the phone. A cold sweat broke on her back.
She glanced at the two large windows. They were at least three or four floors up. Hard to tell since they took countless flights of stairs and no numbers marked the floors.
A middle-aged Arabic man unfolded his lithe frame from behind the massive desk. His salt-and-peppered dark hair streamed uncovered down his back. A keffiyeh head covering lay draped over the back of his chair. She wondered what caused the burn scar deforming his left cheek.
As he moved close, his looming height intimidated. And his eyes…their color was unnatural, almost…aqua, but didn’t look like he was using contacts to augment the hue. The malevolence within him oozed in his gaze like a cobra readying for the strike.
How could you be so reckless? Stephen Levin’s voice rang in her head. Stupid. Going off half-cocked and getting into deep waters again. Every warning alarm in her body blared exit. Now.
In a low voice, raspy to a degree that suggested a life-long chain smoker, though she smelled no evidence of cigarette smoke, he said, “Miss McGinnis, it is good to meet you. I am Terek Nadir.” He extended his hand.
Shay returned the handshake. Chill waves traveled up her arm, leaving goose bumps in their wake. Now, she wanted the guy from last night to be close by. He might scare the hell out of her sexually, but he never once indicated he’d hurt her. Intuition suggested he would protect her from whatever Terek’s ugly smirk promised.
Idiotic move, she thought, to trust anything that had to do with Brant. Escaping this room became her sole focus. A whispering caress along her skin signaled the tattoo that had been resting over her left arm now moved, likely in reaction to her apprehension.
Terek leaned against his desk with false nonchalance. He glanced at the bandage over the left side of her forehead. A crackle of light entered his cold eyes. “What can I help you with, Ms. McGinnis?”
Her heart thudded so hard her ears hurt. She elected to remain standing. “I found some answers last night to the things I’d been wondering about. No need to take up any more of your time. I’ll be going.” She turned to go.
He grabbed the bare skin of her wrist. “Why the rush? You’ve only just arrived. Let us speak about your experience with the daemon.”
She yanked against him.
He clamped down and stared into her eyes. He grabbed her chin to gaze into her eyes for a few long seconds, ending with a strangled whisper, “Shaiani?”
“It’s Shay.”
A cold blast to the point of pain tore up her arm. Terek mumbled unfamiliar words as his hand clamped down. Welts developed on her skin where he touched. Between the bumps, her skin began to crack and bleed. She ordered her body to struggle, to escape, but found herself frozen by an ill-defined power.
The tattoo shot from her sleeve to her wrist. It counteracted the coldness with a protective heat.
He yanked his hand from her. His eyes widened when the tattoo morphed into a dragon and bared its teeth. He rasped, “Bochnori makhaut.”
Shay’s mind translated: Clan of the moving mark. But how did she do that translation? That was not a language she recognized. Clarity hit. The tattoo translated.
The energy around her stirred, crackled. Terek was about to do something far worse than whatever freeze-voodoo he’d used moments ago. She turned toward the door, but Brant had moved in to block her exit.
Trapped. Panic welled within her. A domineering power spread from the moving tattoo. It also knew she must escape. As a control freak, her mind screamed denial. But her command over her body vanished. The tattoo owned her.
As if in a trance, Shay pivoted. She lifted an overstuffed chair effortlessly and hurled it through the glass window. With a leap, she launched herself through the broken window and went airborne. Although a place in her mind was horrified that she had just committed suicide, the forefront of her mind was controlled by the power of the tattoo. It conformed her body into a landing position. With the grace of a cat, she landed on her feet.
No pain, said that appalled section of her mind. Just a firm landing.
She sprinted at a superhuman pace augmented by the power of the tattoo. With a bit of key fumbling, she cranked the rental car and sped through the security gate. Back toward Asheville.
In her rearview, she spied several cars on her tail. Great. She had skipped the course in school on evasive driving. And now that she was back in control of her body, she wasn’t about to relinquish control to that tattoo-thing again.
Once she hit Asheville’s streets, she wove the car haphazardly until she was fairly certain no one followed. After a poorly executed parallel, she ran up the street into a busy fast food restaurant, pushing her way through a line of waiting customers toward the bathroom. It was a two-stall deal. A woman primping in front of the mirror stared at her leg.
Shay glanced down and cringed. Blood soaked her pants. She must’ve gouged herself on glass in that insane jump. Now that she noticed the wound, she did register a vague pain in the area. Her eyes met that of the primping woman, silently challenging her to comment. The woman packed her stuff and rushed out of the room.
The bathroom door slammed open with a force that it bounced against the wall.
They had found her.
****
“How did she manage to jump and not die?” Kiersted asked while staring through the broken window.
“Your stepsister is fascinating.” She’s back! This time she would be his since Dakarai remained locked in the Middle Realm.
The green fire in her gaze when he inflicted the cold-burn up her arms…spectacular. Terek shifted in his office chair to accommodate his arousal. How unique—genuine sexual lust for a human. Certainly he could get it up, and even perform sex in this hijacked body, but he got nothing out of the encounter. Now, for the first time in thousands of years, his peripheral senses functioned. He touched his arousal, and nearly jumped when sensation rocketed through him, but covered his reaction from Kiersted by reaching for the teapot on the sideboard next to his desk. Usually his skin was a barren wasteland of dead nerves. The sensory part of his neurologic system simply didn’t function in this body.
How he reveled in the pain of his arousal in its confinement. Experiencing this again—well, any sensation—was the primary impetus to acquire the Trifecta. Certainly immortality and a free pass forever out of the Middle Realm remained crucial. But to feel…he’d forgotten the intensity of tactile sensation.
To make this permanent, he must unite the wesekh he had acquired a few months ago and the Anukrati amulet. If he could locate the third in the Trifecta of Eternity, then he could escape the daemon curse. He still searched for a clue to the location of the Sword of Neith. Unfortunately, he suspected the gods kept that one close, probably
in Osiris’s Kingdom.
Would the actual act of sex itself be rewarding now? He trembled at the joy of the pain required to climax. Maybe he had just needed Shaiani to awaken his body. He planned to use her for the new needs she’d awakened. First, however, he would experiment with the harem he kept tucked away for his Fedavis’ use. Maybe for once it would be less about on-demand performance and actually about personal pleasure.
Terek asked, “Kiersted, did you know Shay has a bochnori?”
“A what?” The mixture of hate and surprise on Kiersted’s face conveyed much about his relationship with his stepsister.
“It is what enabled her to execute that swan dive and survive.” He waved at the window.
“There’s nothing special about her. Maybe it has to do with the daemon encounter.”
“She is very important to me, and now our top priority. Are Zimeri’s men tracking her?”
“Yes, sir. I expect to hear from them soon. She can’t go far.” Kiersted removed his smart phone from his inside suit jacket pocket and scrolled the screen. “Nothing yet.”
“Did anyone else speak with her while she was here?”
“She was in the waiting room with that kid.”
“The magus candidate? Cy? Bring him in here.”
Several minutes later, Kiersted pushed Cy in front of Terek.
Terek rose from his chair and sauntered around the wooden desk. “Hello, Cy. What did you and Shay McGinnis speak about?”
“Who?” Cy stared blankly, but Terek didn’t miss a glimmer of something that passed through the kid’s eyes. Recognition? Or evasion? Exhilaration clamped in his gut. Finally, he was about to get somewhere with the runt.
“The woman who waited with you for a few minutes. Alone.”
“What happened to her?” Cy glanced at the broken window. “Did you kill her? Did you toss her out?”
“She jumped out the window.”
“She jumped? Is she dead, then?”
“She has a bochnori.”
Cy’s lips twitched in the corner as if he was about to smile. But he resumed his blank expression. “A what?”
Gotcha. Terek smiled. “Play ignorant, if you like.” Terek rolled his watch to glance at its face. “In a little bit we will have a chat, and you are going to give me the information I seek.”
“I’ve told you before, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Terek switched to ancient Egyptian. “But you do know. I am certain of this because you are no longer concerned if she may be on her way to see Osiris. As you well know, a bochnori would do anything to save its master. I think the gods have reincarnated her, and granted her something extra this time.” How fascinating.
Chapter Fourteen
Shay’s brain ordered her body to make a break for it, or at least let loose a scream to draw attention, but she stood there, dazed and staring. It wasn’t them. It was the throw-your-panties-off-gorgeous bad boy from her hotel room.
My God, this guy was a brick shithouse oozing don’t-screw-with-me vibes. And didn’t that just make her knees weak. She was so not a swooning type of girl.
Despite the warmth of the day, he wore a knee-length black leather jacket. No doubt, he was armed out the wazoo beneath it.
He subjected her to a scrutinizing once-over. A swirling black substance in his irises mesmerized her. She hadn’t noticed that last night.
What was this guy? Definitely not completely human. A month ago, she would’ve rationalized the sludgy black substance obscuring the real color of his irises into normalcy and remain in complete denial of anything amiss.
She wondered if this guy might just be the real deal—one of those mythical, sorcerer-like immortals obligated to fight daemons for all eternity. A Scimitar Magus. Shouldn’t he be a good guy? A hero figure? Why then did her intuition demand immediate evasion? For some reason, her gut equated this guy with death, but not random death. Hers.
His gaze locked onto her blood-soaked jeans. Air hissed between his teeth. “What happened?”
“I had a little accident.”
“Who did that to you?” His tone implied she had but to mention a name and he’d annihilate the being. He moved forward like a predator—slow and deliberate.
His glower suggested he was but a hair trigger away from exploding. She reversed. In an effort to halt his unhurried forward progress, she rushed out, “It was my fault.”
He halted. “You decided to mutilate yourself while fleeing those Hashishins.” He tossed her a skeptical glare. “I do not believe that to be truth.”
“How do I know you’re not one of them?”
He snorted. “Do I look like a coward that relies on dark magik and enjoys summoning daemons?”
Shay shrugged. She backed up another step when he moved closer. The sink dug into her back.
He rotated his inner wrists and held them up for her inspection. “Do you see any slashes? That is what those Hashishins use to power their spells.”
She sidestepped the sink and backed up another step.
He held up his hands palm open and took one step back. His tone softened. “I am not here to hurt you.”
Shay’s mind for some reason added right now to his sentence. She frowned, confused, and wondered where that had come from. “But you are after me for some other reason.”
His mouth twitched upwards and his gaze smoked. Her breath hitched and her nipples beaded against her shirt as her body prepared itself for what that smile promised.
Dakar watched as she pancaked herself against the wall. He may plan to kill her at some point in the future, but that didn’t mean he could ignore the need to protect her, and the surge of passion that ignited only for her. Every bit of nonessential blood in his body coalesced in his groin.
He tried to shake off the desire. That, he reminded himself, had to do with the curse. Bound to desire each other. Destined to hate. One must die.
It’s not real. He thought it again. His body disregarded his brain and replayed naked memories. Fuck. Do not forget who she is. This woman had stabbed, shot, strangled, burned alive, decapitated, staked, drowned, and most recently poisoned him. He hadn’t been aware there was a potion that could kill a magus. Since it came from her hands with lethal intent, then for him, it was fatal. Would she attempt a repeat this time or something new?
But…memory flashes swamped his brain. Naked. Pounding. Needing. Hell, this woman was the best sex ever. He amended that in his mind. She was the only sex possible—another screw-you aspect of their curse. That meant it had to be the best ever.
Yet, for some baffling reason she still had absolutely no memory of who he was. They had kissed and connected. Her memory should be unlocked. Instead, she reacted as if he was a random stranger who planned to ravish her in a stinky public lavatory.
His bochnori alerted him Hashishins lurked nearby. No time for sorting out the conundrum of her amnesia. “We but waste time here. They approach, and we must depart.”
She moved left and slammed into the wall as he stalked close. He scooped her into his arms.
She squirmed, fighting for freedom. Pain bit into his neck. He cursed when he realized she’d bitten him.
He resorted to throwing her over his shoulder. She responded by beating his back.
“Stop,” he ordered, “You are coming with me this time. It is not safe here.” He pushed out of the back door of the coffeehouse into an alley. Immediately, the zinging of the small throwing knives typical of Hashishins surrounded them. Her struggles ceased.
A left-to-right glance calculated at least ten Hashishins flanked both sides of the alley. He pulled out the lighter Khyan had gifted him and flicked it on. With a laugh, he controlled the flames, funneling them to hit the men barreling toward them. He heard the hiss of several knives before screams filled the air when fire took all of them from this life into the Middle Realm.
Dakar ran for the church across the street, entering on the heels of an elderly couple arguing over the architectural
style of the building.
His bochnori signaled more Hashishins lurked in the area. Seichim allowed him to feel their filthy dark auras nearby.
How public were they willing to make their fight in order to kidnap Shay? More important to consider was why they were they so interested in her. Maybe Djoser had recognized her. Damn. How could she be so stupid as to waltz into his domain?
He rolled Shay from his shoulder into his arms and pulled her body into his chest to hide her bloody leg. Silently, he prayed she would stay quiet. A mammoth tattooed man with memorably streaky hair carrying a bloodied woman wasn’t going to remain incognito for long. With his luck, a bystander had probably already called local law enforcement.
He darted along the back of the church toward the door labeled Offices and pushed through a swinging door that entered into a parlor room. He lowered Shay as gently as possible onto a Spartan sofa.
She butt-scooted to the farthest end of the sofa the second he released her. With a moan, she gripped her side.
“What ails you?” he asked.
“Burns.” She placed her hand around a small knife that was embedded to the hilt in her side. In a shocked tone she said, “They got me.”
Without word of warning, Dakar gripped the knife and pulled it out, tossing it aside.
“Owww!”
He lifted her shirt, but she pushed his hand away. Impatiently, he said, “I need to view the damage.”
“Fine.”
As soon as he got a clear view and dabbed away some of the blood, a bochnori moved to encircle the wound that spurted blood.
Dakar jerked his hand away from her. “Where did you get that?” Only his family had that privilege. She wasn’t technically family since they were never together long enough to marry. The fact she had a moving mark was proof the gods were mucking around in his life. Would the bochnori let him touch her?
Shay glanced down. “You know what it is? It was on me when I woke up in the hospital in Cartagena. Really weird. It somehow enabled me to jump out of a third story window to escape Terek Nadir. I landed on my feet like a superhero.”
“Like a what?” He shook his head to shake off the question. “Who is Terek Nadir?”
